


Knows Best

by Page161of180



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Five Plus One, M/M, Mosaic Timeline, and really paternal, and the bittersweetness inherent thereto, but basically i'm just here to make them middle aged, domestic life, listen, remember that eliot has been a father multiple times over 2k19, there are a lot of amazing writers in this fandom, who write fun and sexy adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 14:17:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20931602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Page161of180/pseuds/Page161of180
Summary: Five times that Teddy asks his pop for relationship advice.And one time Pop has a question for Teddy.





	Knows Best

**Author's Note:**

> As noted in the tags, I love the breadth of stories that the fandom tells about these characters. To that wealth, I humbly offer another entry in my continued obsession with Quentin and Eliot as Devoted Old Men Who Communicate Poorly. 
> 
> I won't call it a warning, but let's say-- as a note, this story takes place entirely in the mosaic timeline. My headcanon for the mosaic timeline is that Quentin and Eliot lived a long and very happy life together, but let a lot of things go unspoken that they probably both needed to hear said. All those loose ends and never-quite-resolved insecurities carry a certain bittersweetness, despite the good lives they lived together, especially given the way (in my mind) they inform the choices that Eliot in particular makes when the memories of the mosaic timeline come back. That bittersweetness becomes downright tragic, if you adhere to the show's canon, and believe that Quentin and Eliot never get the chance to make themselves fully clear to each other. But, in the immortal words of Fleabag's Priest, 'why believe in something awful when you can believe in something wonderful?' 
> 
> I hope you find something wonderful in here, even if it's a bit tarnished around the edges.

1.

“How do you know if-- someone _ likes _you?” 

Eliot’s hands still in the middle of snapping the end off of a burgundy bean. 

(No else one actually calls them that, incidentally-- burgundy beans. They’re just string beans, the same as the kind they had back on Earth-- as far as Eliot remembers anyway-- except for the color, of course. But Q had started calling them that as soon as the little buds had started sprouting on the stakes Eliot had put up in the patch beside the daybed, that second or third summer. Not _ green _ beans; ergo, burgundy beans. The wordplay wasn’t exactly Noel Coward or even Hotput the Bunny-- whose sex farces aren’t horrible, honestly-- but somehow the name had just stuck. Like everything with Q, somehow, it just _ stuck _.)

“Are we talking about _ someone _?” Eliot asks carefully, resuming his ministrations. “Or are we talking about Marda?”

Teddy doesn’t blush; he’s not like Arielle that way-- Arielle who was never actually phased by much of anything but whose skin would go pink all over at the slightest provocation anyway. Their little burgundy bean-- or Quentin’s, rather. Teddy _ does _ duck his head to stare at the table, though, looking down at the pile of snipped beans that he’s supposed to be loading into the pickling jugs; and he’s _ exactly _ like Quentin that way. It makes Eliot’s lungs burst, almost, the way the little mop of Teddy’s straight brown hair falls over his forehead. It makes him want to drag Teddy around by the shoulder and point at his little widow’s peak and his caveman brow and the way he smiles with one corner of his mouth after he tells a joke, until someone else nods and says, yup, yes, Quentin Coldwater exactly, because Eliot can’t be the _ only _ person who gets to witness this object lesson in genetics.

“Wait-- Marda? Why are we talking about-- Like, Garo’s daughter Marda? What?”

Well, one of only two people. 

Quentin has turned away from where he’s supposed to be continually stirring the brine over the low fire; they have to do the annual pickling outdoors because the cabin’s three square feet of virtually no windows and even less ventilation is no match for a cauldron of simmering vinegar. The wooden spoon in Q’s hand is dripping all over the ground, making acidic mud, and his eyebrows are bunched together like two caterpillars fighting over a particularly tender leaf. 

Eliot and Teddy share a glance, Eliot shaking his head in feigned sympathy and Teddy rolling his eyes. Eliot still misses the way Teddy used to wave his little arms to be picked up and the way he used to sing out “hi, Papa, hi, Papa, hi!” instead of “fuck off, I hate you, you don’t understand _ anything _,” but this new kind of companionship that they can (occasionally) share now that Teddy is fifteen years old and looking farther past the edges of their clearing every day is special, too. Even if it comes at poor, clueless Dad’s expensive. 

_ Especially _if it comes at poor, clueless Dad’s expense. 

“We’re talking about _ Marda _ because _ she _ \-- along with the miracle of puberty-- is the reason that I had to wash your son’s blankets _ three times _ last week,” Eliot says with deep superiority. “Now turn around; you’re dripping.”

Quentin starts sputtering at the same time that Teddy crosses his arms and shouts, “Ew, Pop! Gross!”

Eliot’s eyebrow goes up. “Don’t you _ gross _ me; you’re not the one who had to try to convince himself that a goose had somehow gotten loose in your quilt and _ shit _all over the underside of it just to work up the stomach to carry it down to the river.”

“Jesus, I did _ not _want to hear that,” Quentin mutters, turning back to the pot like it can provide sanctuary. 

“_ Stir _ ,” Eliot commands, glancing sharply over his shoulder before turning back to Teddy. “If you want to have secrets, do your own wash-- _ more _ than once a month,” he adds, before Teddy can grumble his usual defense. “Now. Tell daddies everything about this _ affaire de coeur. _”

“El, they’re kids. I don’t think it’s an--”

“It’s not--” Teddy huffs out. “I mean, we’re just--”

“See?” Quentin jumps in, satisfied that their little boy is still primarily interested in the wooden animals that Quentin used to whittle for him (badly) and maybe possibly chastely holding hands with girls.

Quentin’s worldview takes a hit when Teddy finishes his sentence with “-- like, fooling around a bunch.”

“Exactly,” Quentin says. “Wait-- _ what? _” 

Q’s face is so aghast that Eliot nearly laughs, but he forces the smile down when he thinks about the way the litany of worried things that Q has fretted into their pillow at night has evolved in the nearly twenty years they’ve lived together, from “what if we never solve it,” to “what if something already happened to our friends,” to “are you sure it doesn’t bother you-- me and Ari, I mean,” to “what if they grow up to be-- what if-- it’s-- it’s genetic, sometimes, depression,” to “did Ari seem kind of quiet to you today,” to “what if he doesn’t remember her,” to-- for the past few years, and with increasing frequency-- “he’s going to leave some day, isn’t he?”

(“He’s supposed to, Q,” Eliot had told him, light as he could manage. “We can’t all be glued to this prehistoric Tetris board forever.”)

“Let me see if I have this right,” Eliot says in the present, telegraphing as clearly as possible that he’s utterly unconcerned with Quentin’s gawping, because the best way to guide Quentin out of a thought spiral-- or at least the way that Eliot is best _ at _ \-- is to be enough of a supercilious ass that Quentin’s innate need to knock Eliot off his high horse (or try, anyway) takes over. “You’re _ actively _ swiping right with the young lady and yet you’re unsure if she _ likes you _likes you.”

He turns back toward Quentin, who’s still wincing at the use of the phrase ‘fooling around’ in conjunction with Teddy, and heaves a sigh. “Well, if you had any lingering concerns about the milkman, I think we’ve cleared those right up.”

Quentin’s nonplussed expression gives way long enough for him to roll his eyes. Across the table from Eliot, Teddy does the same. 

“_ Ugh _, you know your dumb Earth references don’t make any sense, right?” Teddy grumbles, carving little pathways through the pile of snipped burgundy ends instead of putting the beans in jars like he’s supposed to be doing. 

Eliot raps him across the knuckles with an unsnapped bean. “_ Jars _, Statler and/or Waldorf.” 

Teddy huffs and fidgets on the bench, throwing his leg over one side so that he’s straddling it-- because the inability to sit in chairs is another genetic trait he picked up from Quentin, apparently-- but he does start dropping the beans in the jars. A little more than a half even make it _ into _ the jars, instead of falling to the crunchy end-of-summer grass beneath the table. 

“So-- what should I do?” he asks, still fidgety, as he toys with the jar in his hands, refusing to meet Eliot’s eyes. 

Eliot thinks back to one of the first nights that Teddy had been in their lives. Arielle had been nursing him, humming in her broken, offkey way. Eliot was asleep out on the mosaic, as he’d made a habit of doing in those early days, back when he had assumed that the way Quentin looked at Arielle while Teddy squirmed against her fair, freckled collar bones would inevitably lead all parties (but one) to decide that ‘Papa’ had really been intended as more of a courtesy title. It had been Quentin walking out to the cistern and filling one of the tin mugs to help Arielle stay hydrated that had woken Eliot. But he’d pretended to still be sleeping, exhausted by the effort of yet another pattern that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the letter T, until Quentin was back in the cottage. Then, Eliot sat up to listen in to the beautiful couple’s hushed conversation over the beautiful baby, his chest rumbling with the feeling of _ yes, that, exactly _ when Quentin had said, quietly, “I just-- I want him to be different than me in every fucking way, you know?”

“There’s only one thing_ to _ do, kiddo,” Eliot tells the man that beautiful baby is growing up to be, once the memory clears. “You just have to-- ask if she feels the same way you do.”

Teddy makes another face that Eliot recognizes-- but this one from the cracked glass that all three of them now use for shaving. Eliot smiles at him, helplessly fond. 

Teddy looks over to Quentin, who’s half-heartedly stirring the brine over the fire, while continuing to shamelessly eavesdrop. “What do you think, Dad?” 

Quentin opens his mouth to answer, but Eliot interrupts, taking the jar from Teddy and clasping both of his nervous hands in his own.

“Theodore Rupert Coldwater-Waugh,” he says, with more gravity than he’s needed to muster since he lost his crown-- full eye-contact, the whole shebang. “Listen to me carefully, because this is the single most important piece of wisdom I will ever impart to you.” 

Teddy leans in a little closer.

“Never, _ ever _ take romantic advice from your Dad. _ Never _, Teddy. Promise me!”

Teddy just rolls his eyes-- again-- but Eliot chooses to take it as agreement. He chooses to interpret the middle-finger Quentin shoots him-- funny how that’s one Earth mannerism they never lose the instinct for-- the same way.

“Okay. Now get out of my kitchen; you’re savaging my beans,” Eliot says, standing up and shooing Teddy away.

“It’s not your kitchen; it’s the outside. You can’t tell me to get out of the outside,” Teddy lectures, even as he’s already halfway to the edge of the puzzle. 

“Pedantry is as unappealing on you as it is on your father,” Eliot calls out to him. “And bring back some water from the stream; I can smell from here that Dad let the brine burn.”

“I did not!” Quentin says, at the same time that Teddy yells back, “I can’t hear you!” 

When Eliot makes his way over to the fire, Quentin’s stirring with more effort than he was a moment before. Eliot raises an eyebrow at him-- which Quentin ignores-- before standing against Q’s back, and wrapping an arm across Q’s narrow chest.

“They grow up so fast,” he sighs dramatically, letting his fingertips trail against the buttons of the sweater Quentin wears over his ubiquitous wrap shirt. Quentin doesn’t get weepy at the sentiment, but the set of his shoulders against Eliot’s body feels contemplative (yes, Eliot _ does _ know what that feels like, and the way it differs from wistful or moody or morose), so Eliot adds, “The next thing you know, he’ll be asking about protection spells and what to do when you accidentally get fucked up on emotion magic and go to town on your best friend’s cock in the room next door to where your _ very _-serious girlfriend sleeps.”

Quentin just snorts, because they can laugh about their disastrous old romantic hijinks, now. (As long as they talk _ around _ Margo having been there, because Eliot still feels that old twinge when he wonders what she’s doing now. Or _ then _ , rather. In the world he’s not a part of anymore. In the world he maybe never belonged in, even then.) It’s their _ contemporary _romantic hijinks that go largely undiscussed, these days.

Quentin tips his head and looks up at Eliot out of the corner of his brown eyes. Something about the familiarity of the posture, and the way Q fits against him so easily, makes Eliot’s chest prickle. 

“You gave him pretty good advice, you know,” Quentin says, light in a way that sounds conscious. Intentional. Eliot can’t quite read the tone, and makes a new mental entry in his Quentin Coldwater-to-English dictionary, to be studied and classified at a later date. 

For now, he simply rests his chin on Quentin’s head and says, “Your hair is going to smell like vinegar for a _ week _.” 

Quentin laughs out a hum. “Yeah, and that’s-- to say nothing of my beard.”

“Saying nothing is the kindest thing that can be done for your beard, yes,” Eliot agrees. 

Quentin spins around at that, flicking the wooden spoon at Eliot, sending spatters of lukewarm vinegar and sugar into Eliot’s own hair. Eliot takes the spoon away from him with perhaps more groping than strictly required, and sends him to the puzzle, claiming that there’s a limit to how much of a mess he can make with porcelain tiles. Quentin obliges with a smacking kiss to Eliot’s cheek, then trudges off to get himself covered in chalk.

Eliot stands watch over the pot, waiting for Teddy to come back with more water (which he’s about fifty-percent sure Teddy will do, despite his earlier snark), thinking of poor Teddy and how hard it must be, knowing someone else’s body inside and out but having no idea what’s in their heart.

  


2.

“Okay. I have a question and it’s a little bit awkward and kind of sexual, and I don’t want you to judge me.” 

Eliot rises up from the mosaic tiles like he’s being pulled by a cord. He’s grinning, maybe a little bit too pleased. Okay, _ definitely _ a little bit too pleased, given that before he can even eke out a “ _ Mois? Judge _?” Teddy is already shaking his head where he’s sitting on the ladder. 

“_ No _ ; don’t-- don’t be _ that _ , either,” he protests, folding one arm over his chest while the other flaps around at his _ desperately _embarrassing pop. 

Desperately embarrassing Pop just smiles and sits back on his heels. His bad knee immediately protests that move, so he stands up-- creakily, _ ugh _\-- and goes to sit his middle-aged ass in one of the chairs that have been migrating closer and closer to the lip of the puzzle board. 

When he looks back up at Teddy, Teddy is wearing the same worried frown that he breaks out whenever Q rolls his wooden shoulder or Eliot bitches about the arthritis that’s been settling into his joints-- for _ years _ now, mind you. It’s that Coldwater guilt telling Teddy that now that _ he’s _ off having the exciting adventures he deserves instead of keeping vigil over the grumpy old men in their little corner of nowhere, his decrepit dads are going to rapidly fall to dust, instead of continuing their slow, steady, and (in Eliot’s case) wildly distinguished slide toward silver fox-dom. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Eliot admonishes. “And don’t try to change the topic, either. Tell me what’s so awkward and sexual that you had to wait for Dad to leave to even bring it up?”

Teddy snickers, but he doesn’t deny the intentionality of this timing. Not that he could. He’d shown up in the clearing with his rucksack late last night-- with no warning, of course. (Because Eliot just _ has _ things like freshly washed sheets and hot meals at the ready. Well, okay. Yes, technically he _ does _ , on account of, you know, _ magic _. But it’s the principle of the thing.) Since Q hadn’t known in advance that their precious baby boy was going to be home for exactly thirty-six hours, he’d already made a commitment to help Tuck and Saren mend their fence this afternoon, in exchange for some of those unsettlingly blue eggs their hen friends lay. Teddy had borne his dad’s increasingly insistent promises to be home by dinner with good grace, if also with the occasional shared smile with Eliot. He’d also broached his allegedly illicit question as soon as Q’s cart had cleared the tree line. 

“I learned my lesson,” Teddy says around a smile. “No romantic advice from dad.” 

“Hm,” Eliot agrees, tactfully _ not _ pointing out that Teddy had only taken that bit of oracular wisdom from his pop seriously _ after _the time that he’d slunk back home from the harvest fair with a Marda-shaped handprint on his cheek. “No awkward sexual advice from dad, either.”

Teddy just nods, smile beginning to go stiff, but still he doesn’t elaborate. 

“Teddy. _ Spill _.” 

With a sigh that belies the fact that it was Teddy himself, not Eliot, that broached this conversation in the first place, Teddy looks down at his hands, rubbing his palms together. 

“Do you-- remember the girl I mentioned meeting in my letters? The one I’ve been traveling with?” he finally asks.

_ Ah _. 

Eliot betrays nothing, merely nods. “Kira?”

“Kora,” Teddy corrects-- and if there was any doubt on where this conversation is going, on what would _ inevitably _happen when Quentin’s son finds himself thrown together with an attractive someone on a quest, it would be cleared away by the dreamy look in those familiar brown eyes. 

“Right,” Eliot drawls. “Kora. So . . .”

“She and I have been-- “

“Sharing a tent?” Eliot offers, helpfully, when Teddy stalls out. It’s cute, if retrogressive, how his deeply hetero son never had any compunction about getting caught happily rounding bases behind the cottage with Marda, or Marda’s best friend, (or both of them, one illuminating time), but as soon as P-in-V is on the docket he clams right up. 

Teddy rolls his eyes but he nods. “Sure. But, um. There have been-- other people in the tent, too? Sometimes? For both of us.”

“An open tent,” Eliot summarizes, unsure why his stomach suddenly squirms. “That’s-- hardly anything to merit judgment. Provided you’re both happy with your arrangement, of course.”

“We are,” Teddy rushes to confirm. “I am. It’s great. I just-- I don’t know. Lately, I’ve been--” he cuts himself off with a sigh, and-- oh, Eliot realizes, _ that _’s why his stomach started squirming, just before Teddy says, “I guess I was just wondering. What if you decide you want to-- close the tent? How do you do that?”

Teddy’s looking at Eliot the way he used to when he was a kid and he tossed his ball too high and needed Pop to wiggle his fingers and fetch it down from the tree branch-- so sure that he was asking for something that was in Eliot’s capacity to give. 

Eliot swallows. “What-- hm. Why exactly are you asking _ me _?”

Teddy gives him a consoling smile, like he’s the parent and not the kid, just because he’s a grown man with a life of his own now. “Pop. I know you guys didn’t exactly advertise it to me, but-- it wasn’t that subtle, you know? I don’t think I really understood it at the time, but in retrospect, all of your ‘special friends’ who came to visit always looked like they were, like-- carved out of something really solid, you know?”

Eliot laughs, too high and fluttery, at the description. 

“And then there was Dad and that lady who rescued goats--”

“_ Gerta _ ,” Eliot fills in automatically, the laughter abruptly gone, until he catches himself and schools his smile back in place. Gerta had been a long time ago, just a couple years after-- _ after _Ari. It had never been serious-- or so Q has insisted. And anyway, Eliot hadn’t exactly lacked for independent company during the period, as Teddy’s recollections apparently attest. 

“Right, Gerta,” Teddy says, his eyes narrowing slightly. “I just meant. It’s not exactly a secret that you two weren’t always exclusive.”

“_ Right _ ,” Eliot repeats, slowly, not quite sure how to proceed. “I guess I’m not-- totally surprised you know that. The reason I asked was more because-- well. It sounded like you wanted to know about how to go from _ not _ exclusive to-- _ yes _exclusive.” 

“Yeah,” Teddy says, nodding, like Eliot is slow to catch up. “That’s _ exactly _why I asked you.” 

“O_ kay _ . Well. I’m _ trying _to say that-- that is not a transition. On which I can speak from experience.”

Teddy stares dumbly at Eliot for several long seconds, which give Eliot time to wonder whether he’s broken his kid’s brain. Finally, Teddy speaks, slowly, like he’s trying to find the tile that fits in the missing spot on a design. “Are you saying that you and dad are still . . .”

“Open tent,” Eliot says, a little strained. “Yes.” 

Teddy keeps staring in that so-very-Quentin disconcerted way, and Eliot has to actually remind himself, for the first time since he was about 17 years old, that his sexuality and its various expressions (and . . . concessions) are nothing to be ashamed of, and that there’s absolutely no reason for Teddy to look like he’s reevaluating his whole childhood. Eliot’s about to say as much, when--

“Are you _ sure _?” Teddy suddenly asks. 

Which-- was not what Eliot expected. That fact must show, because Teddy begins talking again-- quickly-- to explain himself. He’s not exactly his dad’s son where the rapidfire rambling is concerned, but he can hold his own, now and then, when the situation is awkward enough. 

“I just meant-- I mean. Obviously you’d know your relationship better than I would. But. Well, I mean-- _ come on, _Pop.” 

Eliot has officially _ no _ idea what that means. “Come on _ what _?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Teddy widens his eyes, like whatever he’s talking about is really obvious in some way that Eliot is just _ missing _, and it’s starting to annoy the shit out of Eliot to be perfectly honest, light of his life or not. 

“You’re acting like an open relationship is just some . . . layover on the way to a _ real _ relationship,” Eliot says, testy in spite of his efforts to sound neutral. “It’s not like people-- _ level up _or something, once they’ve been together long enough.” 

The fact that he resorted to one of the most _ Q _ Earth-isms possible to explain himself in his hour of distress is only making Eliot more annoyed. 

“I-- don’t know what most of those expressions mean, but-- I get your point.” Teddy says. “It’s just--”

But Eliot’s on kind of a roll now. “Your dad and I are-- perfectly happy with how things are,” he declares. 

As soon as the words are out, he realizes the _ real _ reason for his aggravation. Because it would hardly make for ease, would it? Finding yourself in the position of stalwartly defending a state of affairs that _ you _ hadn’t strictly wanted to begin with, that hadn’t even been your idea, except, of course, for the fact that it _ had _ been your idea, that _ you _ were the one who brought it up and wheedled and said, _ but she’s so cute, Q, and she likes you _ , and _ pushed _ for it, not that Q had needed much pushing, really, given the way that he had _ jumped _at the chance to--

Well. 

That’s neither here nor there, really. 

“Pop,” Teddy is saying, more gently, looking down at Eliot from his perch on the ladder. “I _ get _all that. I just meant that-- I don’t know. Maybe things are different now that you’re empty-nesters and all. But at least as far as I can tell, neither of you have actually been with anyone but each other in-- what? Twelve years? Fifteen?”

Sixteen, actually. Eliot thinks, anyway. The end of the Gerta situation had been-- damaging enough to the little cabin’s domestic tranquility that for a long time after, Q had limited himself to keeping the homefires burning, as it were. Probably because he was afraid that anything else would make Eliot’s selfish, jealous, grasping head start spinning circles, Linda Blair-style. Eliot had started abstaining then, as well-- just to keep things even, of course. They’d fallen into the habit of-- _not_ exercising all options, after that. But they’d never actually taken those options off the table. 

“People can be in an open relationship even if they aren’t _ currently _sleeping with other people,” Eliot demurs. 

“Yeah, I know, but-- for fifteen years?” Teddy says with a laugh. “ ‘Cause they can also be _ not _ in an open relationship anymore and just too stubborn to actually talk about it.”

Eliot rolls his eyes and stands up, because _ that _ thought doesn’t bear further consideration. “It must be so nice to be such an expert,” he says, as he walks over toward the wooden table. “Surely a relationship guru like yourself doesn’t need _ my _help to sort out what to do about you and Kora’s tent flaps.” 

Teddy opens his mouth, no doubt to backtalk (can they still ‘backtalk’ when they’re twenty-two? Or is it just called being an adult with their own thoughts and opinions at that point?). But he cuts himself off when Eliot stumbles-- _ just _ because his foot fell asleep, damn it. He’s not an old man yet. He’s just barely cracked his fifties, even if he _ already _ has lines at the corners of his eyes that would have made his younger self break _ fingers _, with how swiftly he would have tutted them away.

(His current self was tempted to do the same at first, candidly. Except that it turns out the lines are like a magnet for Q’s gentle fingertips, whenever they lay in bed blinking at each other in the later-than-it-should-be morning light. Which makes it harder than it ought to be to wish them gone.)

Teddy has already jumped down off the ladder with the reflexes reserved for the hale and hearty, and is reaching for Eliot’s elbow to steady him. 

“Enough, enough,” Eliot grouses, shaking his arm free-- but keeping Teddy close all the same. “If you really want to help your poor ailing pop, then go get my pan from the hook over the fireplace, so that I can have this bread done and cooled before your father gets home. Otherwise I’ll have to hear him whine for a fucking _ week _ about how hard he had it doing first-year mending spells all day while everyone else was lugging around literal tree trunks.” 

He busies himself checking on the dough that’s been rising in the covered pot on the table. Teddy laughs and heads toward the cabin door obligingly, but he stops just in front of the door, spinning back to face Eliot.

“Are you _ really _saying that you’d be totally fine if Dad decided to just-- go home with some random guy or girl at Tuck and Saren’s tonight?”

Huh. On second thought, Eliot _ might _be closer to decline than he realized. There’s no other explanation for the way his chest clenches at Teddy’s question. 

No other explanation at all. 

“Well, fortunately,” he tells Teddy, all measured ease and careful sass, “it’s not something I need to worry about, since your father and I are too _ old _ and _ feeble _to get it up anymore, as I’m sure you can tell.”

The deflection works. Teddy smiles that shit-eating grin that’s so similar to Quentin’s, but is somehow also all his own. “Yeah, that’s not _ really _ the impression I got when I showed up in the clearing last night. Did you guys forget how to use muffling charms now that there’s no kid around to scar anymore?”

Eliot tosses a dishcloth that has no hope of reaching Teddy, but gets his point across all the same. “_ You _ need to start announcing your visits. Now go. _ Pan. _Earn your keep.”

They don’t talk anymore about Teddy’s question for the remainder of his visit. But the next morning, after Teddy has accepted Q’s manfully stoic goodbye with a soft smile, Eliot takes his hand off of Q’s shoulder long enough to wrap up their not-so-baby in a tight hug. 

“Just-- talk to her. Tell her what you really want,” Eliot whispers against his soft hair before letting go.

He ignores the look that Teddy gives him in response for the rest of the day.

  


3.

It’s hard to hear Teddy’s question, hesitant as it is, over the sound of Quentin abusing tiles like they’ve mortally offended him.

(Someone _ has _, of course-- mortally offended him. But it wasn’t the poor tiles.)

Eliot pauses Teddy with a hand on his forearm. Without looking away from their son, Eliot pitches his voice to carry across the clearing. “Have we decided that the beauty of all life has been ceramic shards all along, or do we just want to make sure that our displeasure is noted?”

There’s another _ thunk _ of a stack of tiles hitting ground, this one punctuated by the now-familiar crack and shatter of a square coming down too hard against the lip of the puzzle. 

“Wonderful,” Eliot says, still refusing to actually look over at the tantrum Quentin has been throwing for the better part of a day, after 48 straight hours of tragic-eyed silent treatment apparently lost their luster. “What are the odds, do you think, that that one was extraneous to the solution?”

“I wouldn’t know,” comes the snide reply. “I’m not exactly ‘bringing anything to the table’ here, remember?” 

Eliot winces at Quentin’s words, his eyes shooting down to the gnarled wood grain of the old bench where he and Teddy are sitting. He runs his hand over the seam where Quentin mended the bench’s arm once upon a time. 

“Pop?” 

Teddy’s soft question draws Eliot’s attention back. 

“Everything-- okay around here?”

Eliot blows out a breath and puts on his brightest smile, bringing a teasing hand up to Teddy’s cheek, like he’s still five. “Daddy and Daddy are fighting right now, but we still love _ you _very much.” 

Teddy laughs and squirms away, but he’s still looking at Eliot with concern.

“It’s fine,” Eliot says. “Really. We’re just-- having a little disagreement, at present. It’ll blow over.”

Teddy sighs. “What did you say this time?”

“Excuse you?” Eliot can’t help the laughter that bubbles up at Teddy’s knowing expression. “It _ had _ to be _ me _who said something?”

Teddy shrugs and smirks, but he casts a furtive glance towards his dad and lowers his voice before saying, “He says stupid shit, too. You just never punish him for it.” 

Eliot is-- not certain how to react to that comment. The assessment is not-- inaccurate (although the fact that their son is so familiar with their fight behavior is probably a mark of failed parenting on at least a couple levels). Eliot has never relished the art of the snit the way that Quentin really, truly does. But then, a proper snit is honest in ways that Eliot-- prefers not to be. A snit says, ‘what you said hurt me.’ How much safer, and more elegant, to simply take that hurt and feign unconcern, until you’ve well and truly goaded your partner into throwing the snit that you secretly wish that you could have.

For example. Imagine that one’s partner were to find himself particularly raw and tetchy after coming out of a bad-brain spell (which are less frequent than in his younger years, but still happen and still make him alternately weepy over and resentful of the care you do your best to provide while they last). Imagine that said partner then pieces together local gossip and a few back-of-the-envelope time-dilation equations to determine that some seminal moment in Fillorian history is about to go down, then mopes around about being so close yet missing it, then becomes hugely indignant about the Sanctity Of The Quest when Eliot helpfully suggests they take a few days off to play fly-on-the-wall, all culminating in said partner hissing out that _ we’re fucking _ trapped _ here, Eliot, when are you going to get that? _

In that particular hypothetical, you see, a person could let their lower tremble the way it badly wants to or could storm off or rub at the physical ache that opens up behind their breastbone at the word ‘trapped.’ Mortifying.

_ Or _ . That person could simply become sneering and superior in their insistence that Q go be an eyewitness to history _ alone _ . Eliot can hold down the fort by himself, thanks very much. It’s not like Q is bringing anything to the table anyway-- which are _ exactly _ the fucking words Q needs to hear after a bad brain stretch, Jesus _ Christ _, Eliot--

This is getting a bit far afield.

Eliot clears his throat and reaches out to put his hand on Teddy’s shoulder again. He’s grateful as always for the opportunity to see their kingdom-travelling son (the one they only have _ because _ they got _ trapped here _, Quentin), even if he wishes it wasn’t because Teddy is so obviously hurting. 

“We’re supposed to be talking about the spectacular implosion of _ your _love life,” Eliot coos, rubbing briskly over the knobby bones of Teddy’s shoulder. “Tell Papa everything.”

He knows that his asshole gambit succeeds when Teddy barks out a laugh and swats at his arm. “Wow, Pop, I’m really feeling the compassion,” he says with a roll of his eyes, even as he settles in against the back of the bench. He reclines there for a moment, looking around at all the little odds and ends that filled his childhood. 

Eliot thinks, as he watches his son’s forehead relax in profile, that even if he and Quentin _ do _solve this fucking puzzle and save future-Fillory one day, the best thing he’s ever done with his life will still be this-- the fact that Teddy sees the place he grew up as a haven, and not something to escape. 

Teddy breaks the contemplative moment with a long exhale. “Kora and I have been together for a long time,” he says.

“Almost two years now, right?” Eliot confirms. He tries to say it the way two years would have felt when he was Teddy’s age and all his prior relationships could be measured in hours, and not the way it feels now that he’s spent_ twenty-five years _fucking things up with Quentin. 

Teddy nods. “I kind of figured that she and I would . . . But. I don’t know. Lately it just feels like-- there’s nothing holding us together anymore? Except for the fact that we made all these plans together.” 

Eliot takes the words in with as much equanimity as he can. “Do you still love her?” he finally asks.

The way Teddy ducks his head, ashamed, is answer enough. “I still care about her,” he says, a shade defensively. “But-- it kind of just. I don’t know-- it feels more like obligation at this point.”

There are moments in parenting, Eliot has figured out, where you have the choice between saying what you want to say and saying what your kid needs to hear. His own parents had pretty much built a vacation home on one side of that line. Eliot has done his best to make his way to the other. That’s the reason that, as he stares at his son’s miserable face, he pushes down the panicky urge to yell, _ stick with the obligation! Don’t leave the person that your questing ways tossed into your path, no matter how much better you deserve! _

Instead, he reaches for Teddy again, urging his chin up with a knuckle. “Hey,” he says softly. “You don’t ever need to feel guilty for what you want. Or what you-- _ don’t _ want. Anymore.” 

Teddy’s face screws up the way it always has when he’s trying to conceal the wide-open expressions he comes by honestly. He nods at Eliot’s words, but turns away, looking back into the woods. Eliot lets him, bringing one hand to rub Teddy’s back, like he used to when Teddy was tiny and scared of the noise that the wind made against the trees in the dark. 

“You’re a good man,” he says, loud enough that Teddy can hear even angled away. “And you have such a big heart, baby. And you deserve-- so much more than to stick with someone that you don’t want that way anymore, just because you both started out on a path together.” 

His voice cracks, just a little, when he adds, “I want you to find the person that you _ belong _ with. Not just someone you feel-- _ trapped _with, okay?”

Teddy still doesn’t turn around, but he nods again. “Thanks, Pop,” he says quietly, with a heartbreaking little sigh. 

They sit there on the bench, listening to the chatter of the birds in the late fall woods, until Teddy stands up, wiping his face surreptitiously as he does. 

“I think I’m gonna take a walk down to the river,” he says. “Do you need anything while I’m out?”

Eliot smiles, with just a hint of all the pride he has in this thoughtful, resilient, openhearted young man. “If you see any of the little pink mushrooms by the banks, we could use them for the stew tonight.” 

He watches until Teddy disappears through the trees, then he turns back to the mosaic. When he does, his heart lurches.

He’d almost forgotten that Quentin was there-- as out-of-character as that may be. The angry banging of the tiles had stopped sometime during Eliot and Teddy’s heart-to-heart. Eliot had assumed it was because Quentin had quieted his stomping and huffing out of consideration for Teddy’s heartache. But it turns out that Quentin had stopped doing anything at all. He’s standing frozen in the middle of the empty board, a few scattered tiles around his feet, looking at Eliot with pinched-together eyes. 

Quentin’s stillness shatters all at once, and suddenly he’s stalking across the board, away from the bench where Eliot is sitting, and toward the daybed where Eliot has been sleeping the past three nights. Without a word, he yanks the pillow and the quilt off the pallet, balling them up in his arms. 

Eliot had watched enough-- oh, what had they been called? The TV channel with all the domestic-drama movies?-- well, whatever they were, he’d watched enough of them, back in his Earth days, that he assumes at first that Quentin is about to take Eliot’s effects and toss them over the treeline. But instead, he marches them right into the cottage. When he re-emerges in the doorway a moment later, his arms are empty and crossed. 

Eliot swallows hard. “Did you throw them in the fire by any chance?” he asks, as lightly as he can.

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I put them back on the bed,” he says, voice even and blank. 

“Is there-- any particular reason for that?”

Quentin answers with a particularly belligerent shrug of his shoulders inside his lumpy brown sweater. “Oakthump said it was going to freeze tonight.”

It never stops making Eliot want to groan that groundhogs are _ actual _weather forecasters on this planet, but that’s not the salient point right now.

“Okay,” he says slowly, not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth but also not knowing what, exactly, is happening here. Not knowing how much he can hope for. “Well, that’s-- appreciated. Although. In point of fact, it _ also _ froze last night. And the night before.”

Quentin says nothing, keeping his arms tightly crossed, while Eliot continues to watch him with eyes that probably read more puppy-dog than optimal.

Suddenly, Quentin huffs and takes a few shambling steps toward Eliot, then stops just as abruptly a few feet from the bench. “I am still-- _ so _ fucking angry with you,” he says, apropos of nothing, raising one arm to jab in the direction of Eliot’s throat.

Eliot opens his mouth to acknowledge Quentin’s anger, but Quentin interrupts him.

“_ No _ ,” he grits out. “Oh my God. Seriously, just-- _s_ _ hut the fuck up _ . I don’t want to look at you, okay? I don’t want to talk to you. If you so much as _ breathe _ on me tonight, I swear to _ God _I will kick your ass, Waugh.”

He snaps his jaw shut so tight it practically makes a sound. But other than that, he doesn’t move a muscle, just stays there, practically vibrating his annoyance, eyes fixed on Eliot. 

Eliot presses his lips together, and decides to risk it. “It feels like-- there may be an _ and _coming.”

For a second Quentin looks like he’s going to make good on his ass-kicking threat, then just as quickly, he sighs and his arms unfurl, coming up to rake through his gray-streaked hair.

“_ And _ ,” he finally admits, when his arms drop to his side, his livewire energy replaced by something quieter, “you _ belong _in the cottage. With me.” He chews at his lips for a beat and looks away, then turns back to Eliot, his eyes intent. “We both belong here, Eliot.”

Eliot doesn’t say anything-- _ can’t _, actually. So he just nods. 

Quentin nods back, once. Then, as if he never spoke at all, he turns on his heel and heads back to the mosaic. A few seconds later the sound of moody banging starts again. 

Eliot listens to it gratefully, before getting up to start dinner for his family.

  
  
  
4.

“So. Um. Any advice on how to actually-- do this?”

For the first time in Eliot’s recollection, his son is speaking, but Eliot doesn’t even_ think _ about looking at him. Eliot is just barely paying attention to Teddy at all, really. Because whatever words Teddy is saying suddenly pale in comparison to the little cream-colored blanket that’s shifting restlessly in Quentin’s arms. The tiny rosebud mouth that keeps opening and closing without making any sound. The soft, squashed, completely bald head.

Ms. Rella Coldwater-Waugh. 

Their _ granddaughter _.

“Hi there, pretty girl,” Quentin keeps whispering, again and again, as he sits with the baby in the crook of his elbow, the sober dark blue of his tunic a contrast to the warm tan of her skin. 

All these years Eliot has lived in fear of a pretty girl running off with Quentin’s heart, and now it’s happened, and he can’t regret it at all. Instead, he just keeps rubbing his hand up and down the knobs of Quentin’s back, watching Rella’s feet kick inside her swaddle. She breaks free at one point, and Eliot leans over to tuck her wrinkled little foot back inside the folds of the blanket, bending forward to kiss the heel before he does. 

The baby girl makes another little smacking sound with her mouth at Eliot’s kiss, her little head turning from side to side like she knows that something happened but isn’t sure what. For a second her eyes seem to catch on Eliot’s face, and for some reason, Eliot is nearly knocked out of his chair with a wave of something that feels almost like-- _ grief _. But then her eyes dart away again, and the wave passes. 

Eliot straightens up and looks away from the baby just long enough to look at Q, who’s staring back at him, his big brown eyes glistening. Eliot can’t help but press a second kiss to Quentin’s temple, then, right against the loose fringe of Q’s now _ mostly _ gray hair. And for a moment, the feeling of being here with Q, of holding the granddaughter who belongs to both them, is so overwhelming that he has to remind himself that none of this was ever meant for Eliot, just to stay grounded. To remind himself that he and Q are really just-- best friends who found themselves thrown together in a place and time not their own.

No matter that it’s the only place or time where Eliot’s life has ever truly _ worked _.

“Oh, _ I _ get it.” 

Teddy’s voice, grumbling but irrepressibly happy, breaks into Eliot’s trembling thoughts. 

“Is this how it’s going to be now? Esmie and I give you two the grandbaby that Dad’s been haranguing us about for _ years _, and suddenly I’m old news?”

Eliot does his best to look abashed, but Q just gulps a little laugh and says, “Yeah, pretty much,” while continuing to rock the baby against his chest. 

Teddy smiles, and Eliot’s struck once again by how well the life he’s chosen agrees with him-- in this little cottage by the sea, with the quiet, pragmatic woman that he undoubtedly belongs with, and that he never would have met if the wanderlust he inherited from his mother hadn’t led him out of Quentin and Eliot’s woods and into the wider world. 

“Sorry,” Eliot says, even though he can tell he sounds more sheepish than truly apologetic. “What-- _ ah _. What were you saying?”

“I was _ asking _,” Teddy says, still beaming, even as he continues to play at annoyance, “if you have any words of wisdom for your precious baby boy now that he’s a father himself?” 

Eliot chuckles at the question, and nudges his shoulder against Q’s-- gently, so as not to jostle the baby. “What do you think, Dad? Any advice to pass along?”

Quentin looks up from the baby just long enough to grace first Teddy then Eliot with a skeptical glance. “Oh, am I allowed to answer this one?” he asks with faux surprise, eyebrows still raised. “I thought we had a moratorium on Dad’s advice.”

“That’s on _ romantic _advice,” Eliot says, affecting an exasperated groan. “Your dad game is much more on point. Wouldn’t you say so, Teddy?”

Teddy grins at the two of them-- _ the three of them _\-- and leans farther back into the cushions that are propping him up, where he sits on the floor of his cottage’s bright, airy front room. “Definitely less of a disaster than your romantic game,” he affirms, as the sea breeze catches a strand of his chestnut hair. 

“Gee, thanks.” Quentin rolls his eyes, then looks back down at Rella. “You’re going to be on my side, aren’t you, little one?” he asks, his voice soft and bright and beseeching. “They pick on your granddad so much. But you’re way more compassionate, I can tell.” 

“Mmm,” Eliot hums, wrapping his arm the rest of the way around Q and giving a consoling squeeze. “Magic eight ball says not likely.” 

“_ Ugh _,” Teddy groans from his spot on the floor. “Dad advice number one: quit making weird references that don’t make any sense. Thanks for the reminder.”

Eliot glances over to his son and sighs. “All of those ‘weird references’ are artefacts from a civilization that doesn’t even exist yet. We’ve been expanding your cultural horizon since birth. Put _ that _ on your list.” 

“Number two: get super sanctimonious about your weird annoying references,” Teddy shoots back. “Got it.”

Eliot’s about to open his mouth for another retort, when Q’s soft voice cuts through.

“You just have to be there for her,” he says quietly, staring down at the yawning baby in his arms, with his whole reckless, extravagant heart in his eyes. “There’s more detail to it than that, probably. But, um, that’s-- pretty much what it all comes down to.”

Teddy’s teasing grin goes soft at Q’s advice. It goes softer still when Quentin finally looks up and smiles back at him, adoring and so damn proud. Eliot thinks his heart might burst just from seeing the two of them together like this-- so much alike and so much of Eliot’s world. It reminds Eliot of the way it used to feel, watching his two boys, back when Q could hold Teddy’s tiny, soft little body the way he’s holding Rella’s now. 

Eliot tells himself he manages to hide his sniffle fairly well. It’s only coincidence that Quentin happens to look over at him directly after.

“What do _ you _ think, Pop?” Q asks softly, his eyes knowing. “Any more, uh, sage wisdom to add?”

Eliot thinks about responding, but the words-- _ be there for her _\-- catch in his throat, for reasons he can’t quite place.

“El?” Quentin checks in, softer still, when Eliot doesn’t answer. “You okay?”

Eliot makes himself nod. “Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I agree. Just-- just be there. That’s what matters.”

“Be there,” Teddy repeats. “I think I can manage that.”

Eliot looks back down at the baby then, who’s nodding off in Quentin’s hands, her feet still giving the occasional kick. He smooths a careful hand over her bald head and wonders if her hair will be brown like Teddy’s when it comes in, or dark like Esmie’s. 

The thought of a baby girl with dark hair makes his throat unexpectedly start to close, again. The strange dread starts to lap at him once more, mysterious and out of place in this sun-soaked, beautiful moment, but unquestionably _ real _. The feeling is a little like running from something in a dream-- you can’t name it, but you know it’s right there, ready to catch you, and that everything will hurt terribly when it does. 

Quentin and Teddy’s conversation continues to drift, peaceful and content, around Eliot as he tries to make sense of the odd foreboding. 

“ . . . although I guess we, uh, probably need to add a disclaimer,” Quentin is saying, as he shifts Rella from one elbow to the other. “Because neither of us have any experience raising a little _ girl _ . Neither of us even had any sisters. You’re the first one in the family to be a dad to a _ daughter _.”

Eliot shakes himself, trying to get out of his own head. This is a special day for his family. He should take Q’s advice and _ be there _for it. He opens his mouth to rejoin the conversation, ready to tease Q for his gender essentialism, with words that he’d learned from his still-missed Margo (heavily redacted, given the infant company), such a long time ago.

But when he speaks, what comes out, instead is, “Actually he’s not.”

Quentin’s head cocks in confusion, replaced by horrible realization, when Eliot clears his throat, the clog of tears and loss suddenly making so much more _ sense _ , and says, “The _ first _, that is. I-- I also. Had a daughter.” 

For a moment, everyone in the room is still, except for Rella, who goes on kicking her little legs, lost in her own baby cares and concerns. 

Teddy, their thoughtful little adventurer, dares to speak first. “How is that--” he starts, before furrowing his brow, unsure how to finish.

Seeing Teddy struggle is probably the one thing that could make Eliot form words of his own right now, and it does. 

“It was-- in our other life,” he says. And even though he’s forcing the words out through determination alone, he’s pleased to note that they do sound reassuring. Gracious, even. “Your dad and I told you I was married in that world, right?”

Teddy nods, slowly. “So that you could get the weapon to defeat the Beast.”

Eliot nods back, trying to conceal the stab of guilt at Teddy’s accurate summary. Fen had been a necessary technicality to Eliot and little more-- although he thinks perhaps they could have become _ true _ friends, in time. Maybe it’s karmic synergy, that in one life he was married to someone who was just barely a friend, and in this life he finds himself raising a family with someone who should _ only _be a friend but is so damn much more.

“Fen and I-- she was expecting a child,” he explains. Tries to explain. It was a long time ago, and it was complicated even back then. “She lost the baby,” he says, chagrined, as he says it, mostly because of the way it still doesn’t feel _ real _to him, even now that he knows what it means to have a child, how unthinkable the loss should be. “Or so we thought. But then the fairies-- well. There was a lot going on at the time. The main thing is that I never really . . . knew her. My daughter.”

_ I was never _ there _ for her _, he thinks. 

“Jesus, El,” Quentin breathes, right at Eliot’s side. He sounds beside _ himself _with guilt. “Jesus. I’m sorry-- I. I totally forgot.”

“It’s okay,” Eliot manages to say, around that sickly lump in his throat. “I did, too.”

Esmie, who’s been taking a well deserved nap in the bedroom, calls for Teddy then, and Eliot insists with a smile that Teddy go and take care of their daughter-in-law. 

“Don’t worry,” he says, lifting Rella out of Quentin’s arms and bringing her to rest against his own chest, “we’ll see that this little lady is well taken care of.”

The weight of the baby in his arms helps to ground Eliot in _ this _ life, where he still fucks up every damn day, but where he’s also gotten some things _ right _ . Where he’s been _ there for them _ \-- for his granddaughter, and his son, and his-- _ Quentin _ . If nothing else, he’s been _ there _.

“You would have been a good father to her,” Quentin says softly, after a few quiet moments pass. He starts stroking a hand down Eliot’s back, the way that Eliot did for him earlier, and Eliot has to close his eyes. 

“Maybe,” Eliot allows, without really believing it. Q, for all the chronic depression, is an optimist in a way that Eliot never will be. Whatever kind of a father he is in this life, whatever kind of grandfather he will be, Eliot knows too well the fuck-up he had been back then, in their other life, afraid of his own shadow and always ready to run. Even when he’d _ tried _ to be there, it never seemed to work. He’d ignored his wife and barely noticed when his daughter-- _ his daughter _ \-- was taken from them; was mostly just confused when the fairies allegedly gave her _ back, _ fully grown and resentful as hell. He’d gotten the kingdom he was supposed to rule overrun by fairies. Things with Margo had been-- weird and wrong and starting to get better by the time he and Q had left, but _only_ starting, as much as it kills him to admit it. And even with Q-- the high-strung little nerd Q had been back then-- Eliot had chased and chased, but never seemed to actually _ help _. 

The Q that’s beside him now, who’s still high-strung and nerdy and little but also wiser and steadier and sporting a genuinely _ atrocious _old-man wizard beard, keeps up his quiet petting. 

“Maybe one day,” he offers, “we’ll solve the puzzle and you’ll have the chance to find her again.”

Eliot doesn’t say anything, just focuses on rocking the baby girl that’s in his arms here and now. He can’t afford to speak, because the truth, which might come out if he _ did _ speak, is that he hopes he _ never _goes back to that life. As shitty a husband and father as that makes him. He just-- doesn’t ever want to be that fucked-up kid again.

What he wants is to take Q’s advice. And be _ here _ . Now. For _ them _.

So that’s what he does.

5.

“So-- here’s a question for you.”

The torches are crackling and throwing shadows across Teddy’s face. They make him look so much older, sitting in one of the two chairs that used to live inside the cottage year-round but which, in recent years, have been pressed into outdoor service on mild summer nights like this one, because Quentin and Eliot’s days of being able to sit on the hard ground and then stand unassisted the next morning are long past. 

Actually, Eliot observes thoughtfully, it might be the new glasses, not the firelight, that make Teddy look so much older. He’s been wearing them since he and Esmie and the three girls had showed up at the clearing yesterday morning-- _ with _advance notice this time; thank God for Esmie. Eliot hasn’t mentioned them, hasn’t wanted to draw attention, but they’re becoming on Teddy. They add to the effortlessly squishy dad vibe that must be coded into the Coldwater DNA.

(Frankly, the glasses suit Teddy’s aesthetic much more than the wire-rimmed things that Eliot had begrudgingly started wearing three or four years ago suit his own. But the arthritis in Eliot’s fingers makes popping off spells a much riskier proposition than it once was, especially for something as fiddly and delicate as a vision-enhancement spell. He’d actually asked Quentin to cast the spell for him before he gave in to his bespectacled destiny-- a sure sign of desperation. But Quentin had demurred, citing his long and storied history of magical backfires. Eliot likes to think Quentin declined because he has, over the years, come to value having Eliot’s face where it is, and not blown off by a pinkie placed a quarter-inch too far left. In Eliot’s more skeptical moments, however, he suspects that Q’s refusal had more to do with the fact that whenever Q is lying in their bed beneath Eliot-- softer and furrier than he ever was before, with a little more flab on his tummy and his ribs, and still so sexy Eliot doesn’t quite know how to process it-- Q will inevitably reach up when Eliot pauses to take the damned things _ off _, and slide them back in place with that breathless little smile, and say ‘no-- keep them on.’ Which isn’t such a bad thought, either, actually.)

Eliot’s heart gives a little kick at the memory, and then another when he hears Q’s excited “Look there! Peth-- can you see, sweetie?” echoing somewhere beyond the trees, where he (and Esmie) are leading the girls on a hunt for the little purple and pink bugs that remind Eliot of what Earth fireflies would be, if some intrepid zoologist had taught them to drop acid. 

A chorus of small ‘oohs” go up-- and a slightly deeper one that sounds suspiciously like their normally stoic daughter-in-law. Eliot buries his smile in another sip of the peach cider that he’s been nursing all night, then grimaces. This batch borders on mealy, it’s so sweet-- not nearly enough complexity. Q had said it was fine when they opened the barrel the week before last, but Q has the palate of-- well, he would say Peth, Teddy and Esmie’s youngest, but she’s surprisingly sophisticated for a two-year-old. Maybe closer to sweet Silby, who’s younger than Rella by a year and a half and so _ Q _it’s hard to watch sometimes. Teddy, who falls somewhere in the respectable middle of the taste scale, still hasn’t finished his first mug of the stuff, even though he’s usually good for two or three, when there are extra hands around to wrangle the girls.

“A question for _ me _,” Eliot says, once he’s managed to swallow the syrupy-sweet cider down. “Should I have a lawyer present?”

Teddy just snorts and leans back in his chair, his smile going wider as Peth’s shreiking giggle echoes wild through the trees. “How do you know,” he asks, like he’s reciting a riddle, “when you’ve met _ the one _?” 

Eliot raises an eyebrow as high as he can-- even though he knows the effect isn’t as dramatic as it once was, when said eyebrows were coal-black and studiously maintained. He hopes it’s still enough to distract from any evidence in his bearing, of the little stutter his heart made at the question.

“I hope this isn’t about Esmie,” he drawls casually, to complete the illusion. “Because, call me old-fashioned, but I sort of hoped that you’d answered that question two or three hellions ago.”

It’s one of the baser hypocrisies that have ever passed his lips-- and my oh my, have there been some doozies-- but whatever. He’ll blame it on the peaches.

“Don’t call my children ‘hellions,’” Teddy corrects automatically, reaching his foot over to kick at Eliot’s shoe. “Their preferred address is ‘demons.’ And-- _ no _, of course it’s not about Esmie.” 

It makes Eliot happy, that his son is so secure in his-- well, technically, he and Esmie never got married, but in his relationship, anyway-- that the idea there being any doubt about who they are to each other can only read as a punchline. It makes Eliot feel some other things, too, but happy is the primary one. The _ important _one.

Eliot kicks Teddy back, carefully. “Noted. So, what is this about, if not the seven-_ ish _-year itch?”

Teddy’s eyebrows draw together. “Is that another--”

“Oh, you _ know _ that it is,” Eliot interrupts, with a wave of the hand that used to command armies-- well, theoretically. If Fillory had _ had _real armies. “Shall we skip past the whining about Earth culture this time, and go to the part where you actually answer the question?”

Teddy glowers through a long-suffering sigh, but he answers all the same. “Rella asked me the other day. I-- had no clue what to say to her.”

That little plot development makes Eliot lean forward in his chair, resting the still mostly full tankard of cider on the ground beside his chair. “_ Rella _ asked? Was she--”

“I think it was just curiosity, and not because she was looking for advice,” Teddy assures him. “I hope so anyway. _ Gods. _Do eight-year-olds ask for romantic advice?”

Eliot hums in response. “I can’t speak to _ eight _, but I do remember that you couldn’t have been more than ten when you started mooning after the woman who had the pie stand in Bobblehelm. The one with the enormous-- cobblers.” 

Teddy’s blush says that remembers _ exactly _who Eliot is talking about. “I’m pretty sure it was the pies that I was interested in,” he insists, without quite meeting Eliot’s eyes.

“Funny. Your father used to say the same thing,” Eliot intones with a raised eyebrow. But he takes mercy on his red-cheeked son, and brings the conversation back around to Rella’s apparently burgeoning romantic streak. “Why didn’t you just tell Rella how you knew you wanted to be with Esmie? Unless-- _ oh _. Was it a mid-coital epiphany?”

Teddy’s jaw drops and a laugh tumbles out. “What-- no! _ No _ . Pop, seriously. How does your _ mind _work?”

Eliot’s mind _ works _ at its most blistering pace, churning out revelations he’d rather table, when _ he’s _ inside of _ Quentin _\-- to be perfectly honest. But he doubts that Teddy wants that much detail about his silly, cranky old parents, so Eliot lets his comment be the joke that it was mostly intended to be.

“Well, if not _ that _,” he says, with another wave of his hand, “then why can’t you just tell Rella how it happened for you and Esmie?”

Teddy looks down at his hands around his untouched mug of cider. It’s sweet, really, that he looks _ more _embarrassed than he did swatting aside Eliot’s innuendos, when he says, “Because I knew with Esmie the moment I met her.” 

There’s a substantial part of Eliot that wants to call bullshit on the admittedly touching sentiment-- because he _ remembers _ Teddy, in the early weeks and months of Teddy and Esmie’s courtship. He probably even still has some of Teddy’s old letters from that time, with their run-ons and their paranoias, tucked away in the cedar chest by the bed, folded up beside one of Arielle’s old hair ribbons, and the shirt Q was wearing when they walked through that clock, and the page of their pattern diary that Quentin _ still _thinks was chewed off and taken away by a squirrel, that bears the record of the time Q chose a design that was all brown with flecks of gold and green, and only shrugged and kicked at the ground when Eliot asked what the inspiration was. 

So, basically: revisionist history. Of the highest order. But, as far as revisionist histories go, this one really is so disarmingly dear-- and such a stark reminder of how much Teddy is like his dad, when it comes to his faith in fairytales-- that Eliot is willing to let the exaggeration stand.

“What’s so wrong with telling Rella _ that _?” he asks, voice gentle. “As far as stories go, it’s-- almost revoltingly wholesome.”

“It’s kind of a lot to put on a kid, isn’t it?” Teddy answers, like this is something he’s been thinking hard about. “I don’t want her to think that she needs to be waiting for some-- lightning-strike moment in her own life, you know?” 

Privately, Eliot doubts that Rella has a lot of mental and emotional bandwidth at the moment for anything but memorizing facts about salamanders and running roughshod over her little sisters (over Silby, anyway; Peth is already proving a formidable opponent). But, then, Eliot is also more or less ground zero for what happens when an impressionable child internalizes shitty parental views on the various forms of love and one’s entitlement thereto, so he’s not going to call Teddy’s instinct wrong.

“Well. You could always tell her that it happens in different ways for different people. That way she doesn’t get too attached to any one narrative.” 

Teddy nods, which only makes sense. It’s good advice, Eliot thinks. It’s the kind of sober, respectable advice that a man with three grandchildren (dear _ God _; he’s a man with three grandchildren) should be able to dispense. 

Which probably explains why it blows up in his face. 

“So how did you know with Dad?” 

Teddy asks the question like it’s not a grenade lobbed into the geometric center of all the things that Eliot capital-D Does Not Think About, even after all these years. Eliot sputters for a moment, before reaching for the mug of cloying cider on the ground by his chair-- a call for help if ever there was one. 

“It’s-- you know it’s never been like that for your dad and I,” Eliot finally manages to say, once he has the cool weight of the tankard in his hands. He wishes briefly for the heavy, solid rings he used to wear in his youth-- as if they’d even fit over his swollen knuckles now-- if only for something to clink as a distraction. 

“What’s_ that _supposed to mean?” 

Teddy laughs as he asks the question, like what Eliot is saying is odd. Like in all these years it’s never occurred to him that his fathers are anything other than a proper Toro and Cybilline. (Don’t judge: Hotput the Bunny’s turn toward star-crossed romances had been a resounding critical and commercial success.) “You guys are the most old-married-couple I know.”

Eliot tackles the easy part of Teddy’s statement first. “Okay,” he says, finger wagging,”first of all, bite your tongue: I am _ not _old.”

“You’re a _ grandfather _,” Teddy says, deadpan.

“And whose fault is that?”

Teddy rolls his eyes, the very portrait of filial deference. Meanwhile, Eliot plots the next stop in this loaded conversational course. 

“It’s also worth noting,” he says, gesturing carefully with the tankard, “that your dad and I are _ not _, in fact, married.”

It comes out even and easy, like Eliot _ hasn’t _ spent thirty-some years, off-and-on, reminding himself that Q has never even raised the _ topic _ with Eliot, notwithstanding that he and Arielle had been standing under a tree with a rope around their wrists less than six months after the first time Quentin had led her out behind the cottage-- to the very same spot where Teddy would one day escort half the eligible maidens in the forest and surrounding villages-- while Eliot pretended to nap on the hard tiles. 

Teddy’s crooked smile is, as it always is, a good reminder that Eliot has never been so grateful for a turn of events that he had only pretended, at the time, _ didn’t _kind of break his heart. 

“I _ know _you’re not married,” Teddy says, still matter-of-fact. “Neither are Esmie and I-- technically, I mean. Legally.” He shrugs, so unbearably like Q, when he adds, “What does that matter?”

_ It matters _ , Eliot wants to say. But he’s never even said that Quentin; he’s _ certainly _not going to dump that shit on their son, especially--

Especially not when Eliot is past old enough to have moved past being precious about all of this. 

Because-- listen, he _knows_. He is, chronically, _aware_ of the truth, that he and Quentin aren’t the great love story that their son, the perpetual romantic, believes-- or at best, that they’re only half of one. But, despite his protestations to Teddy, Eliot also knows that he’s an old man now. And if-- oh, _damn it, _what had it been called? That future-old show with the sassy old broads sharing a lanai in Florida, that he and his Bambi used to say they’d become one day?-- if _that_ show, whatever it was, had taught Eliot anything, it’s that old people are allowed to have zero fucks left to give. They’re supposed to, even. So perhaps Eliot should try that for a change, and finally give up his tedious rending of garments over the fact that Quentin’s life and love were never rightfully Eliot’s to share, and were instead given under conditions that are best described as a kind of cosmic duress. Perhaps Eliot should simply throw his head back and cackle at his windfall and declare his victory over karma-- that Eliot has taken those years anyway and spent them-- _well_\-- and there’s no unwinding or getting them back from his gnarled old hands now. 

“I just meant that-- it was all very situational, with your dad and I,” Eliot says-- a kind of middle ground between continued denial and triumphant crowing. “I don’t think either of us knew that we’d end up being-- the _ one _, for each other, after a fashion, until after it had-- already turned out that way.”

Teddy tilts his head slightly, like he’s considering Eliot’s answer. He nods, once, before his serious expression cracks and he rolls his eyes so hard Eliot’s surprised his glasses don’t fall off.

“Toadshit,” Teddy says, firm and clear. 

Eliot can feel his eyebrows rising up the wire rim of his own befucked spectacles. “Pardon?”

“Toadshit,” Teddy repeats, a grin spreading across his face. “That’s complete toadshit, and you know it. I’ll bet you any amount of money that you knew Dad was the one for you before you ever walked through that-- clock, or whatever it was, that brought you two here.” 

Eliot takes a turn at rolling _ his _eyes, and then takes the beat it provides to school his voice into something bored and casual. “So much for impressing on Rella the diversity of lived experience when it comes to falling in love, I guess.”

“_ Toadshit _ ,” Teddy says one more time-- perhaps relishing the opportunity to indulge in the kind of quaintly Fillorian profanities that a house full of impressionable children doesn’t generally allow. “People may fall in love in all kinds of ways, but I know you and I know Dad, and there’s no way that the _ mosaic _made you do it.”

“What do you want me to say?” Eliot sighs, with sarcasm that sounds borderline convincing, if he does say so himself. “That I knew your dad was the one for me the second he stumbled through the wards at Brakebills, looking like a lost little ice cream cone that didn’t even know it needed a good licking? And yes-- that _ is _another Earth reference, by the way.” 

Teddy doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he just stares at his pop in tolerant amusement, his smile never faltering.

Eventually, he leans back in his chair, bringing his own mug of cider in against his chest. “The funny thing,” he says, mildly, “is that I think you actually _ believe _your own toadshit.”

_ That’s not the funny thing _ , Eliot wants to say. The funny thing is that he’s not, _ ugh _ , toadshitting-- not at all. Because-- yes, Eliot has wanted Quentin from the first moment he saw him. But that’s not when Eliot knew Quentin was the _ one _. 

Eliot only ever knows that Quentin is the _ one _ when he opens his eyes in the morning, and Quentin is still there beside him, all crinkly eyes and downy hair. Until the day starts and he goes back to not knowing again, until the next morning dawns to test the hypothesis all over again.

“Oh, drink your cider,” Eliot huffs, in lieu of an answer. 

Teddy obliges. The sickly flavor finally wipes the knowing smile off of his smug, precious face. 

“Hoo boy, Pop. That is--”

“_Right_?” Eliot agrees, happy to have some validation at last. “Your father said it was fine, but we all know he has questionable taste.”

Teddy looks at him strangely, one eyebrow quirking up in one of the few expressions that nurture, and not nature, gave him. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess you _ would _ think that.” 

They sit in silence for a few minutes, punctuated only by the giggles from the woods, that are getting louder and closer, saying that their family is on its way back. 

“You know, I asked Dad about how you know when you’ve found the one, earlier-- while you were showing Rell and Sil how to make biscuits.”

Eliot gives an arch look that he thinks effectively conveys _ you asked _ him _ before _me? But Teddy just gives him another mysterious look, before saying, “He-- answered differently than you did.”

Eliot would like to think it’s something age-appropriate but not fatal, that makes his heart start to flutter wildly at Teddy’s sly pronouncement, but he knows it’s something far more adolescent-- and terminal, to boot. It always is, with Q. 

“What-- did he say?” he finds himself asking, nervous as a virgin, before he can stop himself.

Teddy raises his eyebrows, all innocence, and says, “I thought we didn’t listen to Dad’s romantic advice?”

“We don't,” Eliot says immediately, his heart still racing hard enough to make the words shake. “I was testing you, of course.”

“Of course,” Teddy echoes.

They don’t speak after that, just keep their eyes on the tree line, until their loved ones appear, like magic, out of the dark and into their circle of light.

  


+1

“Take a look at that.”

Esmie nods toward the clump of people dancing on the hard blocks of color that are usually the bane of his fathers’ existence, but tonight are a dance floor. 

Esmie’s hair went silver so much faster than Ted’s has, and it glints in the setting sun. He reaches out and runs his fingers through the short strands at the nape of her neck, where years out on her family’s fishing boat have turned the skin even darker than when Ted first met her. 

She raises her eyebrows but doesn’t pull away, and Ted keeps his hand where it is while he follows the line of her sight to the crowd of people dancing under the floating amber lights that he’s _ sure _ Pop put unnecessary strain on himself to make. He sees Silby first, with a nest of colorful flowers in her hair, dancing with her new husband. Rella and her girlfriend are nowhere in sight, and Teddy makes a mental note not to walk out behind the cottage anytime soon-- or to do so with his eyes covered. Peth is there in the middle of the crowd, jumping up and down, trying to touch the floating lights. She’s surrounded by her cousins on Esmie’s side-- who had travelled all the way from the coast to this quiet corner of the Great Forest where Ted had grown up, because his tender-hearted middle daughter couldn’t bear the idea of getting married without her granddads there to see it, and everyone knows that two days’ travel isn’t something Dad _ should _ do anymore, and isn’t something Pop even _ can _. 

His gaze makes it to the back corner of the mosaic, near the bench where Pop and Dad like to sit, and he finally sees what Esmie was trying to show him. She slides an arm around his waist as he takes in the sight-- saying nothing but supporting all the same. Her usual way.

Pop is standing just outside the lip of brick that borders the puzzle, leaning heavily on his characteristically overwrought rams-head cane. But the arm that’s not connected to the silver grip is slung across Dad, who’s standing just in front of him, back to chest-- close enough to lean if Pop were still strong enough to hold him up, but close enough to touch, anyway. Dad’s head is tipped back, resting carefully against Pop’s shoulder, while Pop leans forward to nestle his cheek against Pop’s messy white hair.

Most people who had seen them decades before-- back when Pop could bully Dad around the floor at harvest festivals, flinging him out and reeling him in, graceful enough to overcome Dad’s deep skepticism of the activity as a whole-- probably wouldn’t recognize the slight shifting from foot to foot that the two old men are doing right now as dancing.

But, then, most people don’t know them as well as Ted does.

His breath catches in his throat, and he’s not actually sure if it’s because of the way that Pop used to be able to lift him up over his head and hold forth about ‘airplanes’ and other things that still don’t make sense to Ted, or if it’s because of how much the soft reddish smudge that registers in his memories as his mother would have loved seeing Dad and Pop this way after all these years, or if it’s because of the wide, contented smile on Dad’s face, just from _ this _. 

The peaceful moment breaks when one of the dozens of local kids running around the clearing grazes past Pop, making him lose balance. Ted is stepping forward before he realizes he’s doing it-- Esmie, too. But Dad is already right there to keep Pop steady. He leads Pop the few steps to their bench, patting at his shoulders and laying his cane across the cushion, so that it’s in easy reach, before hobbling off toward the cottage, his own slow pace a far cry from the frenetic, fidgeting man Ted remembers from his childhood here under the leaves.

Ted turns to Esmie, but she’s already nodding, and peeling away gently, headed toward the clump where her brothers are drinking and telling their best-- embellished-- stories about their negotiations with the pike and herring delegates. 

Ted weaves his way around the edge of the mosaic, returning Sil’s joyful smile as he passes, until he reaches Pop. Before he’s even all the way kneeling beside the bench-- which is a move his knees are probably going to regret when he stands back up-- Pop’s already rolling his eyes and huffing out, “I’m _ fine _. Your dad’s just fussing.”

“Of course,” Ted agrees, with a roll of his eyes that he doesn’t bother hiding. 

Pop crosses his arms, and gives him a _ look _, but doesn’t otherwise comment. 

“Silby looks so happy,” Pop says when he finally does speak again, after a few moments of watching the crowd dance across the square that’s hosted his whole adult life. All the haughty annoyance that was in his voice just a minute past has melted away, as he watches his granddaughter shine.

Ted knows that Dad and Pop both love all their granddaughters equally. But he also knows how much of _ Dad _ Pop sees in Sil-- how much they all do, really. He knows that it makes it all that much sweeter, to see her snuggling happily into her husband’s adoring embrace, when some days her sweetly thrilled smile seems to be buried so far away. 

“Well, being in love will do that,” Ted says carefully, trying not to overload Pop’s still-limited capacity to accept affirmation.

Pop nods. He’s quiet for a few moments more, while Sil goes up on her tiptoes to melt into a kiss. When he turns back to face Ted, Ted’s surprised to see that his eyes look wet behind his glasses. 

“You think he knows, don’t you?” he asks with an urgency that Ted can only rarely remember hearing from him. “Your dad. He knows that I-- he knows how much, right?”

Ted’s hand grips Pop’s knee, squeezing as tight as he can without hurting. “_ Pop _. Of course he does.” 

Pop nods quickly, blinking back the sheen in his eyes so quickly Ted almost believes it was a trick of the light all along. 

It’s on the tip of Ted’s tongue to ask what’s the matter, why Pop is so worried about something that couldn’t be more obvious, but then Dad is back, with a cup of water in one hand a sweater in the other. 

Dad nudges the black and silver cane aside so that he can plop down on the bench beside Pop. Teddy takes the cup of water from his hand, holding onto it while Dad pushes and prods Pop into draping the second sweater over the one he’s already wearing. All three of them pretend not to notice when the fabric slips out of Pop’s grip, on the first couple tries. 

“I told him he’s been overdoing it,” Dad tells Ted, in lieu of thanks, when Ted hands the cup back to him. “This many light charms would have been a lot when you were _ forty _,” he says, attention back on Pop, “and we both know forty was a long damn time ago.”

“Says the man with the Gandalf beard,” Pop answers. 

For once, Ted lets the cryptic reference pass unremarked, which pays off when Dad’s face goes soft and delighted. 

“Aw, El, you say the sweetest things.”

Pop sighs, but brings his fingers up to stroke once, lightly, over the bristly edges of the long white whiskers. “You _ would _take it as a compliment.” 

Dad just reaches forward and tugs the second sweater so that it wraps more securely across Pop’s chest. “Now,” he says, voice stern (or his version of stern, which, as Ted learned well in his teenage years, is mostly just fussy), “are you going to stay on this bench voluntarily, or am I going to have to tie you down?”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time, Coldwater,” Pop returns, the same way he would have when he _ was _forty (if he thought Ted was out of earshot). 

Dad’s eyebrows bunch together in what Ted and Pop used to call his ‘not mad just disappointed’ face, and Pop sighs. 

“Q, I told you,” he says, “as soon as the guests leave, I’m going to park my ass in the comfy chair and drink cider with my feet up while you hobble your way through a _ week’s _worth of patterns. For now, let’s just-- enjoy tonight, okay?”

Dad swallows tightly, but he nods. Then, he heaves an annoyed sigh that he had to have picked up from Pop, somewhere along the way, and puts his hand on his hips. “Great. So-- you’re planning to just kick back and make _ me _ do all the work, as soon as the party’s over, huh?”

Pop’s smile is diabolical. “Well,I thought that would be a nice reversal from the first fifty or sixty times that we--”

Dad opens his mouth, indignant, but Ted is already on his feet.

“Okay, that is-- definitely my cue to go,” he says, with a grimace that feels closer to a smile. 

Dad gives a sheepish little wave and Pop mutters something that sounds suspiciously like ‘prude,’ but he pats at Ted’s hand when it stops to rest on his shoulder anyway.

As Ted makes his way back across the clearing, to where Esmie is watching him with her dark eyes, he stops for one more look back at his fathers. He watches Dad help Pop lift the cup of water to his lips-- the mirror to so many times that Pop was the one guiding Dad through the motions, keeping him fed and watered and washed, during a dark stretch. 

Dad’s eyes are so soft as he supports the bottom of the cup with one hand, and brushes his thumb over Pop’s collar with the other, that it never even occurs to Ted that maybe he should have _ asked _\--

You_ know, Pop-- don’t you? How much he loves you, too _.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
